Entertainment

Loebner Prize Winner Announced; Is He Human?

Yesterday we talked of the news of Siri, the ambitious and far-reaching AI project to recieve $8.5 Million in funding. Today I noticed the news that the Loebner Prize winners had been announced. In case you're not familiar with the Loebner Prize, it's a yearly contest held to determine which chatterbox AI is the most sentient as determined by the guidelines set forth by Alan Turing.

Alan Turing a mathematician considered to be the father of computer science, tackled the then-philosophical question that as to whether a computer could think, and if so, how we could tell. The suggestion he put forth was that if the computer's efforts at conversation were indistinguishable from human responses, then the computer could said to be thinking. The methodologies pioneered in the field that rose to take on this challenge are the basis for what a lot of modern semantic web technologies are based from.

The Loebner Prize is conducted blindly, that is by way of a chat window, and judges are given a mix of human and AI participants. Success in the contest has several levels. There's a Turing prize, which comes with a $100,000 cash reward and is measured by a machine who is able to fool humans in a Turing test that includes deciphering and understanding text, visual, and auditory input.

The more realistic goal is the $25,000 prize consists of fooling all panelists into believing the machine is human via the chat window. Each year, the bot which performs the best wins the bronze prize, which comes with a cash prize this year of $3,000.

This year's bronze winner was Elbot, the creation of Fred Roberts. Elbot was created in the Kiwilogic's Lingubot Creator, a commercial platform created by a German company looking to augment or replace businesses reliance on human powered customer service.

Those interested in playing with the bot who was able to fool Reporter Will Pavia of The Times this year into believing it was human can do so at Elbot's home. Like most of us who fancy chatterbots, Roberts has grand visions for where he sees his creation's eventual application.

"I hope that some day they will build a life-size Elbot, implant the bot in his brain, and let him walk around and talk to people while I update him vie satellite," Roberts said, while admitting it likely wasn't all that feasible, at least "not with current technology."

I've tended to be partial to Alice over the years, a bot that's been in the running since 1999, and has won the competition several times, but has recently not met with the level of success that her challengers have. Of this year's entrants, the most interesting entrant to me was one which didn't make it to the finals of the competition.

Most chatterbox AIs focus on contextual replies, and don't do much to make judgements and internal cognitive decisions. Mohan Embar saw this as an area of weakness, and set about creating a bot named Chip Vivant who's primary function was to be able to make judgements like "which is bigger, my toe or a 747?" For this task, it performs surprisingly well, but falls short in most other areas of conversation.

The whole field and contest is a fascinating subject, and for those even slightly interested in machine intelligence beyond Hollywood throws at us will find themselves spending a few hours playing around with the different entrants and wondering what could be.

Mashable
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